The current paper document-processing environment is heavily dependent upon paper processing, which can be inefficient. What is needed is a distributed electronic paper document capture, storage, and process system to alleviate or otherwise mitigate the dependence upon paper form of items such as personal and business checks, for example.
In the prior art, a “thick” client (or, at least, a “smart” client) is used to provide an image of a check and associated data (or a number of checks, as the case may be), which is recorded on the client (computer) and subsequently transmitted to the central processing system. However, this arrangement can have some disadvantages. Deployment of the thick client can require necessary data collection and data processing software to be installed onto the local client computer responsible for the collection of document data, which can be relatively time-consuming as well as administratively expensive.
Further, there can be security concerns. Under “Check 21”, images of checks are, in general, usable in the same way that an originally executed check may be used. The security concerns regarding the current state of the art processing data collection and processing systems arise because it is conceivable that an unauthorized third party may access a significant amount of image data relating to checks, which has been collected/processed at a particular local computer, when the collected data is submitted to the central processing system.
A further problem in current systems is inherent in centralised processing of the items, where all decisioning of the items to result in selected settlement paths is carried out at a host system, thus providing for potential bottlenecks in item processing during peak volume periods, for example.
A further problem is in efficient management of the system when it includes a plurality of client systems (for uploading the items) and one of more respective host systems (for processing the items to assign a respective settlement path) in the environment of multiple customers of the system, all with their own settlement and item processing needs.